Books

1921. Richmond: Printed and Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. 1921. 8vo. Card covers printed with a woodcut design in red featuring a tiger surrounded by palm trees, flowers and pineapples; pp. [iv], 5-55, [1]; wrappers browned, with chips to spine ends and lower corner of upper cover; creased along edges and spine; water tide mark to lower cover; rust mark to ffep affecting the upper corner of the first few pages; a very good copy, regardless, of a scarce work. First edition, sole impression of a purported print run of just 300 copies, with a cover artwork by Dora Carrington, a painter and illustrator who was closely associated with the Bloomsbury group and a close friend of Lytton Strachey. Published in April 1921 and handprinted by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Stories of the East was one of six books published by Hogarth in 1925, and ultimately its most successful. Leonard’s stories outsold all but Gorky’s second book, The Notebooks of Tchekhov…

Stories of the East is a collection of short stories by Leonard Woolf, depicting life in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) during the British colonial period. Woolf's keen observations and experiences from his time as a colonial administrator are reflected in this anthology.